A dusted white heritage sign stands in dry grassland, right next to two burnt tree trucks. Not far from the sign is a wide circular artefact piled by several rocks, with a few dark, flat, sliced stones lying on the rim. As I walk around the artefact, I notice the ground is filled with small, flat stones that seem to be part of a destroyed house. I look back at the heritage sign. All it features is a note explaining that the place has been listed as ‘Heritage Site No.8’, a phone number for inquiry, and the logo of the National Trust of Australia.

If I was travelling alone, I wouldn’t have realised that such unrecognisable ruins in a shuttered gold mining site in Pine Creek, three hundred kilometres south of Darwin in the Northern Territory, had contributed to the foundation of Australia as a nation today. The site was known as the Chinese 12-mile Settlement, where the first group of Chinese labourers resided after they arrived in the Top End in 1874. Just next to the gold mine where they worked, on land now covered in dust, rocks, china pieces, and the grasses and young trees that had grown after bushfires, dozens of Chinese workers built their residential houses and temples. The tall circular artefact of stones had in fact been a pig oven where the workers cooked pork for worship.